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Manhattan should get power back on Saturday, but it will take longer for thousands of others. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

If you’re waiting for the lights to come back on in New York, it could be a while. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers could remain without power through next weekend, ConEd just announced, and many thousands more could wait even longer for the lights to come back on as the utility continues to struggle with the impact of this week’s hurricane.

ConEdison announced at 1 PM today that many of the 650,000 customers currently without power may remain in the dark until November 10th or 11th.

And they can count themselves lucky. “The remaining customer restorations could take an additional week or more,” the utility said.

As of 11 AM crews had restored service to 250,000 of the 900,000 customers who originally lost power as a result of Monday’s hurricane.

Customers served by underground networks in Mid- to Lower Manhattan who lost power during the storm will have service by this Saturday.

In areas served by overhead electrical distribution equipment, like hard hit Westchester county to the North of New York City, crews are struggling with blocked roads, flooding and more than 100,000 downed wires.

Asked why ConEd had had to reevaluate how long the resumption of power would take, company spokesman Sara Banda said the company has remained “consistent” in saying that it would take a long time to restore service for everyone in the wake of Sandy. “It’s unprecedented” she said. “This is most storm related outages in the company’s history.”